Word: tropicalism
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...books that followed Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn exhibited less dirt-and less talent. Miller overwrote for the sheer sake of verbosity; he made hyperbole into a principle of composition. Everything he described was either incredibly glorious or incredibly distasteful. On a visit to Greece he felt "a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat. . ." Revisiting the cities of America he found "a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum . . . the most horrible place on God's earth." Critic Alfred Kazin once said of him: "Is there anything...
Hyperbole & Profanity. Thus waders along the Tropic of Cancer could find some evidence of real talent there: Miller's portraits of all the phonies he knew in Paris-and he knew plenty-were biting and edged with a wild, outrageous humor...
When Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, came out in Paris in 1931, it was greeted with shocked silence, snickers, or the sound of licking lips. Its admirers took its weedy profusion of four-letter words for daring wit and convention-defying "art." Miller became the hero of Bohemian barflies and Greenwich Villagers everywhere...
...week the expatriate might listen to Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller expounding in four-letter words his philosophy of life-the essence of which, Author Putnam says, "was to the effect that prostitutes are about the only pure beings to be found in a world of reeking garbage." There was also frustrated Author Leo Stein, whose loathing of his prolific sister, Gertrude, was a feature of the boulevards. "My God, Sam!" Leo would groan to Author Putnam, "You have no idea how dumb she is! Why, when we were in school, I used to have to do all her homework...
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), who looks like a bald Irish politician, has been puttering at watercolors for 20 years, but privily. He first displayed his stuff in a Greenwich Village bar, more recently in Santa Barbara, Calif., in London and at Yale...